What lessons can the region learn from Detroit's fall?

Jul. 21, 2013

If there’s one thing I want people to understand about the City of Detroit’s collapse, it’s that most of us working here tried. We were neither lazy nor incompetent workers. In my 20-plus years as a city of Detroit employee, there have been many people like myself who brought good credentials and a sense of purpose to our work. I am not alone when I say that bankruptcy represents a professional failure, as much as a financial loss for us.

For many of us, working here was taking care of our hometown. My grandparents moved here when they were eager to make their own way in the world a century ago. For colleagues that didn’t have the city to thank for their lives, the promise and the duty of the connections of urban living inform our moral and political perspectives. This city motivated me to seek a PhD in urban policy analysis, and the condition of it has shown me how unsustainable living is the most important issue of our times as Americans. It has connected me even to fellow Americans not of my own choosing.

I came to work every day — each time that state taxes subsidized big developments on the metropolitan fringe, and after each national beating the city took (and some suburbanites delighted in) for Devil’s Night, or its “ruin porn.” Even when our own mayor lashed out in a deranged racist tirade for his “state of the city” a few years back. A lot of city employees have continued to climb a mountain of broken systems to do their tasks, even while counterpart private sector legal, financial and operations professionals had higher salaries — and enjoyed more respect from our peers.

I want people to know the professionalism and commitment of so many here. Detroit’s fiscal collapse is not the result of bad people doing bad things — though the vacuum of leadership during the city’s six-decades-long economic collapse certainly invited opportunists to feed off of it and demoralized many. For as long as bad city leadership failed to address staggering city government failures, the long national bloodletting of deindustrialization and the statewide commitment to consuming more and more land has occurred for a longer period of time. Since the 1950s, national figures worried about the city’s fate as its tax base eroded, and all that happened in response was nothing short of an orgy of over-building. This region has the same number of people it had in 1960, and it’s three times the land mass.

How could this have ended differently? How can the future be different from this epic and shameful past? As we clean house here in the city, what lessons can metro Detroit learn about sustaining a viable place for living and working? What will we do to make our region one that the next generation will want to live in and work for? That is the biggest thing I wake up thinking about these days — not what compensation will be left for my 20-plus years of dutiful public service. I want to know what this region will learn from the liquidation of its own soul.